


dulce et decorum est

by ygrittebardots



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1910s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War I, Class Issues, F/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 18:41:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2161002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ygrittebardots/pseuds/ygrittebardots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the evening of June 27, Jon Stark returns from his first year at Oxford University to his family’s ancestral home. The next morning, an archduke is assassinated in Sarajevo. The summer of 1914 simmers with tension as everyone at Winterfell Castle anticipates the coming storm, but Jon is caught up in a storm of his own as a childhood friendship is fast becoming something entirely different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dulce et decorum est

On Sunday, the 28th of June, 1914, at approximately 10:45 in the morning, Jon is in the Godswood. 

There had been some debate in the old days as to the propriety of the name of the woods surrounding Winterfell Castle before entering the Wolfswood proper, but it was a name that spanned back before William the Conqueror, before Bran the Builder, before Hadrian and Antoninus built their walls. It was a name so ancient, in fact, that the villagers of Winter Town generally agreed that the forest was named in reference to the nameless gods of the pagans that once inhabited it, and should be of no affront to any good Christian at all.

Unlike, perhaps, the current state of Jon’s sister.

“Arya Stark,” he mock-admonishes in his best Lady Winters impression. “Just what am I to do with you? Young ladies of quality are not brought up to roll about in the muck like pigs.”

Arya, covered head to toe in mud and grass with a murderous glint in her eye, barrels straight at him. Jon manages to dodge her, but only just, and runs with an uncharacteristic shout of laughter in the opposite direction. Longer legs work to his advantage, but just as he turns to gauge the closing distance between himself and his sister who’s given chase, he slams into another solid body and is sent tumbling down between the low branches. This is how Arya catches up with Robb and Jon, and is quick to have her revenge on her brothers.

“No better than a pair of wolves, you two,” Robb says once she’s ceased pelting them with mud and sticks, swatting at his filthy cuffs with an absurd air of dignity, as if he’d had no part in their revelry.

Arya hits him.

“You started it,” she protests. Her hair’s fallen out of the neat twist Shae wrestled it into mere hours ago, lank strands laden with dried mud and a bit of twig framing her heart-shaped face. There’s a broad streak of filth on her cheek and high collar where Jon reaches out to pinch her fondly. She swats his hand away.

“Did I?” Robb asks with interest, and shoots Jon a wink.

In truth they both had. With the two of them off at school this past year, opportunities to terrorise their youngest sister have been few and far between. And so Jon had been far from surprised to wake up on his first morning home to find Robb in his room.

“Come on,” he’d said, throwing a pair of trousers at him before he’d time to wipe the crusted sleep from his eyes. “I’ve a plan.”

It was as though nothing changed. 

A relief on some level, Jon would admit, after a year of making introductions, and then watching the tell-tale look on his new acquaintance’s face as they tried to deduce exactly _which_ Stark boy they’d just met. He imagines Robb faced much the same at Cambridge, though he expects his brother’s experience differed from his somewhat as it was then understood that he was, in fact, the respectable kind of Stark to be meeting. 

An entire year of proving through example of behaviour to the posh pricks at Oxford that he was more than simply the circumstances of his birth only made the release of childish play all the sweeter.

 

Quite literally covered in mud is not exactly the state in which Jon had hoped to greet her.

Then again, fate has rarely ever graced Jon with a leg up in his plans.

Ygritte takes one good look at him and bursts out laughing. Naturally, the only thing to do is engulf her in an all-consuming embrace

“Oy, get off, you madman!” she shrieks. Grinning like a fool, he lifts her off her feet in response. Ygritte only laughs harder, batting at him with her fists in the minimal space left between them. “Off!” she shouts again. “Off, or I’ll spear you in the gut with a butter knife while you dream!”

“Ygritte! Is this an estate I’m running or a…”

The rough voice of Seaworth dies out just as quickly as it had cut through the corridor. Jon quickly lets go of Ygritte.

“Master Jon,” Winterfell’s butler coughs, quite unsure what to make of the current state of his lord’s son, nor of his presence in the servant’s passage. “My apologies. Might I be of some assistance, sir?”

“No. Thank you, Seaworth,” he replies awkwardly, feeling much more a young boy being caught in some mischief with Robb than a newly-returned Oxford man. “I simply thought to make a discreet entrance.”

“I see.”

A pace or two behind the butler, Ygritte cocks her chin up and mouths, “Discreet?” as her eyes dance in merry delight. There are any number of faces Jon would like nothing more than to make at her, but Seaworth is still standing between them, looking at him in bafflement masked by what Jon expects he thinks is a very good attempt at respect. 

So instead Jon says, “Yes. Well. Better go freshen up, then,” and heads upstairs.

 

He doesn’t see her again until after dinner. 

The gravel roadway leading up to the door of the kitchens isn’t the most private of places, but in a sense Jon has always thought of it as _theirs_. Growing up at Winterfell Castle afforded him any number of playmates - three brothers and two sisters to start with - but when the stable master’s niece came from Kirkcaldy to live with him after the death of her parents, she and Jon had quickly become inseparable. 

There are hidden advantages to being an illegitimate son, namely fewer people concerned with the propriety of one’s behaviour, and so Jon and Ygritte had remained close long after Robb and Sansa ceased playing with the village children.

Not that Ygritte had remained such for long. She’d come to the castle to work as a housemaid not long after her fourteenth birthday.

“Got to do my bit for Giantsbane, haven’t I?” she’d said. 

It's an old pet name she has for her uncle, a fond mockery of his tall tales. Jon had delighted in these stories as a child, sitting by the fire on a winter’s night next to Ygritte in the cottage she shared with Tormund, a tin mug of tea clasped in his hands. Now a man grown, Jon’s been treated the last few years to the definitively more ribald tales to which Tormund entertains the village pub once he’s had a drink too many in him.

She’s sitting on the stone wall facing out to the Godswood when he arrives, watching Gendry and some of the other lads unload the latest grocer’s delivery in the waning twilight. He hikes himself up beside her wordlessly.

“Got a light?” she asks, and he strikes a match, slipping effortlessly into the old routine, as if the last nine months never even happened.

When she leans in to catch the end of her cigarette in his flame, though, he can’t help but fixate on the milk-white skin of her cheek in the warm glow. A strand of ginger hair’s fallen loose from her cap, and in the flickering light it almost seems to have caught fire itself. For a fraction of a moment, the strange sight has Jon entirely captivated. 

Then she pulls away and the moment’s gone.

Jon flicks out the match, shakes himself out of whatever it is he’s fallen into, and Ygritte’s staring at him like she’s expecting him to say something.

“Sorry. What?” he asks stupidly.

“Christ above, you’re a wonder,” she says. “I asked if you’d heard about the archduke.”

“Oh. Yeah, I did.” 

They’d touched on it briefly at dinner, but Lady Catelyn had apparently known Princess Sophie - which Jon took to mean she’d been presented to her at a ball once or something equally vague - and had no wish to discuss the matter, so she had promptly diverted the subject by asking Sansa about some Tyrell she’d danced with last season.

“Dirty business,” says Ygritte, touching the fag lightly against the pink of her lower lip, a glimpse of white teeth peeking out, before taking a drag. “Think anything’ll come of it?”

“I don’t know,” says Jon, and he can’t take his eyes off that lower lip.

 

Jon is quick to fall into the routine of general activity and nothingness that is a Winterfell summer. 

Lazily organised cricket matches abandoned in favour of taking a dip in the lake, evening visits with Robb to the pub in Winter Town, card matches and horse races through the Wolfswood and books on history and botany from the vast library to occupy the long hours of the day. Not that these hours are often dull. Arya, at the very least, can always be counted on for some nefarious plot to amuse herself that’s generally in need of being stopped.

Indeed, Jon comes across her and Bran one afternoon only moments before she’s about to send him careening down the hill outside the south tower, chair and all.

And then there’s Ygritte.

After-dinner cigarettes outside the kitchens have been a staple in their friendship for years, but they seem to be running into each other everywhere now. In the stables, where she’s looking for Tormund just as he’s saddling up his kit to ride out with Robb; in the main parlour when he wakes up at an ungodly hour just as she and the other housemaids are drawing the curtains to let in the morning light; in the library one deadly dull afternoon, where she peeks over his shoulder to take a closer look at the book he’s reading.

But the thing is, her constant presence isn’t some new thing at all. They’ve been this way since well before he left for school. It’s just that she’s there, or he’s at least aware of her, in a way that never really seemed to be or matter before.

The sight of freckled fingers thumbing through the pages of _Metaphysics_ is intoxicating even as she mocks his choice of casual reading, and it’s then that Jon knows he’s well and truly doomed.

 

There _is_ grumbling on the continent, riots in Sarajevo stirred by the assassination and anti-Serb sentiments, and Austria-Hungary seems to be making threats at everyone and anyone who’ll listen, the way Father goes on about it.

Jon’s not a student of politics, however, and continental squabbles are of little interest to him.

 

Somewhere along the line, perhaps because his very existence goes against all sense of proper behaviour, Jon’s become confessor to his siblings’ impropriety, even when it only takes the form of unexpressed desire. So when Sansa tells him in the second week of July that there’s to be a social dance at the village hall the next evening, he hears immediately the longing underlying her feigned disinterest.

“We’ll have dancing of our own,” he tells her, leading her by the hand to the main hall where the gramophone sits on its table. “Nothing so grand as Willis’s, but I think we’ll make do.”

Which is how Lady Catelyn comes to find her oldest daughter and her husband’s bastard son dancing a waltz at three in the afternoon. The broad smile across Sansa’s face, however, is enough to make any remark die on her tongue, and in the end the Countess of Winters passes through the hall bearing a reluctant smile of her own.

The second person to mention the social dance in Winter Town is Ygritte.

“You’ll be going, then?” he asks, accepting the cigarette she passes to him.

“My day off, isn’t it?” she responds. “Will I see you there?”

Jon frowns. “I hadn’t planned on it. I shouldn’t think… Well.”

“Shouldn’t think what?” she asks, and he tries not to think about her lips pressed against the very fag his are sucked up against now. Soft fingers brush against his when he passes it back, a cool wind unsettling the sparse hairs at the nape of her neck.

He takes in a breath of evening air to settle himself and shrugs.

Ygritte, of course, knows the unspoken answer, knows the odd position he’s straddled his entire life as an earl’s son with no title to claim, and nudges him lightly in the arm with her elbow.

“Don’t be daft,” she tells him. “Besides, I’ll be needing an escort.”

Jon laughs. “Isn’t it generally the proper thing for the man to invite the lady?”

“Oh, spare me,” she grins, and a jolt of something warm, something nearly electric courses through him when she curls her hand over his. “I’m no lady, and we both know proper’s got no place with us.”

 

It all seems so inevitable by the time it actually happens.

Jon spends the entire day with a feeling like a fist-sized ball settled in the bottom of his stomach, clenched up so tight he can’t decide whether it’s because he can’t help feeling like he’s breaking about six different rules of polite society although he can’t for the life of him tell _which,_ or if it’s because of something entirely different.

She’s spent her day off down in the village, and he can’t blame her, but Jon’s become so accustomed to running into her all over Winterfell that the long hours feel empty and unsettled without even a glimpse.

Jon will not remember it in any great detail later. He will not remember the indiscernible look on Tormund’s face when he calls at their cottage that night, but the colour of her dress and the dazzling smile on Ygritte’s face. 

He’ll remember the thunder of dancing feet on the wooden floor.

Grenn Farmer thumping him across the back to stop the coughing when she makes a high-spirited joke.

The taste of ale on his lips and the delighted laughter that leaves hers. 

Her warm hand curled in his when they end the grizzly bear in breathless merriment. 

Her nails across a pale cheek and the red curl she sweeps back behind her ear.

The cool night air of a Winterfell summer.

The inevitability of it all.

The taste of her lips brushed against his, smooth and damp, sweet like tea and spice and something wholly Ygritte. How it was soft and chaste and questioning until it wasn’t, until her hand buried itself in his hair and he deepened the kiss, every small part of him wishing never to come up for breath, willing it to somehow be that he could live in that kiss for the rest of his life.

 

Jon wakes up absurdly early the next morning with a tremendous grin on his face.

And then he feels a bit sick.

Rushing down the stairs, he counts it a stroke of luck he manages to finish the last button on his waistcoat before he ends up in the main study.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out when he finds her. “I’m so very sorry. You must think me a terrible cad. I wouldn’t blame you in the least if you did.”

Ygritte blinks, taking him in. It’s a horribly long, drawn-out moment, made worse by Jon’s sudden awareness of Shae staring at him from behind her, having just thrown open the windows. His cheeks flush red with embarrassment. 

Then Ygritte coughs pointedly and turns to catch the head housemaid’s eye.

“Right,” says Shae slowly. “I’ll be… going, then. Morning, sir.”

“Good morning, Shae,” Jon responds awkwardly, unable to look at her.

“Well done,” says Ygritte once she’s left.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have barged in like… I’m sorry. Will you be in trouble?”

Ygritte shrugs. “Like as not. She knows we’re close.”

Jon coughs at that. “I’m sorry,” he says again, knowing it sounds absurd, not knowing what else to say. “About last night, that is.”

“Are you?”

“I truly am, Ygritte. You must believe that. It was forward, and rash, and I had no right to make assumptions or take advantage like I did. And if you don’t wish to,” he stops for a moment, searching for the right words, “go back to our friendship as it was… I do understand.”

“Oh.”

She bites her bottom lip and Jon tries so, so hard not to notice. “Is Tormund calling up the village watch for my head as we speak?” he asks instead, and she laughs, thank God.

“No, he isn’t,” she responds. “I haven’t said a word.”

“You haven’t?” he asks, feeling the tension somewhat dissipate between them, though he’s suddenly very aware of his hands and quite unsure what to do with them. “I suppose that’s more than I deserve. Might I ask why?”

“Well,” says Ygritte, fixing her gaze on him then, “I suppose it’s because, as much as you seem to regret it, I don’t.”

“You don’t,” he repeats dumbly, and all at once Jon can feel his heart thumping away so hard he half expects it to burst right through his chest, and all he can think is that it’s a good job it’s so early in the morning because it would be so like one of his siblings to walk in right now if it weren’t.

“I don’t.”

“You don’t.”

“I _don’t_ ,” she says, a small burst of laughter punctuating the word.

“The thing is, I don’t, either,” he says, and can hardly believe the words coming out of his own mouth, the exchange flying fast and breathless between the two of them. 

“But you said you did.”

“No, you said that. I said I was sorry.”

“It’s not the same thing?”

“No. And I lied, anyway. I’m not sorry in the least,” he says, and kisses her again.

 

On the surface, nothing changes. Jon spends his days much as he has these past weeks, riding and reading and playing cricket and cards and swimming. Sometimes chasing his little brothers and sister out of their mischief, sometimes taking part. He discusses the news of the day with Father and Robb at breakfast and makes conversation with guests at dinner. He picks up the old habit of sketching the castle grounds and wildlife.

But in truth, nothing is the same at all, and Jon’s mind is at once a million miles away and always just around the corner. 

Wherever he can find _her_.

They pass one another in the upstairs hallway with a respectful nod and the mere inches of space between them are tangible, practically obscene in their mockery. 

From the pond, he can see her with Gilly and Shae on the patio setting out a luncheon, and the broad grin that spreads across her face when Arya and Robb gang up to push him in, clothes and all, is, he knows, for him and not them.

In the library he shows her the book on property law he’s begun reading to prepare for his coursework this coming Autumn, and will never know the question she was going to ask him thanks to Bran’s untimely entrance, the squeak of metal wheel against wooden floor giving them just enough time to create a proper distance between them.

It’s odd, really, how people become accustomed to the little routines that surround their own lives. For while Jon and Ygritte spend their days forever skirting the other’s periphery, constantly aware with a sort of charged energy of the other’s presence, it’s only in the evenings, sitting together outside the kitchens on that stone wall as they have for years, that no one bats an eye or protests that they should do otherwise.

Only it’s different now, as all things between them are. Jon catches her fingers in his as they graze together to pass the cigarette and, with a cursory glance behind him to ensure they’re alone, brushes his lips over her knuckles one by one. Ygritte graces him with a small smile, quickly pulling back her hand only when the kitchen door opens and a pair of hall boys spill out into the yard.

She puts the cigarette to her lips and settles her other hand somewhere in the folds of her skirt, but even without her gaze on him he knows that grin is for him.

 

“D’you find this all a bit ridiculous?”

Jon frowns, and props his head up on an angled arm to look at her properly.

It’s Ygritte’s day off again, finally, near to over a fortnight later. They’ve packed a picnic and biked into the Wolfswood, into a little grove with a nearby grotto they first came upon as children, far beyond the riding paths the Starks generally favour. 

The bread and cheese and bits of tomato and sliced meat have been long-since devoured, and though they’ve both packed their swimming costumes, there’s nowhere decent to change. With little else to do and no desire to return any time soon, they’ve spent the past hour lain out on the linen tablecloth they’d brought, chatting about nothing in particular and watching the clouds above move past.

“We can head back to the village if you like - ” he begins to say, but she cuts him off.

“Not _this_ , you silly fool,” she says, hitting him lightly in the arm with the copy of Keats he’s brought along that she’s been thumbing through. 

“Then what?”

“I just mean,” she starts, and sighs, worrying her thumb over the brim of the purple hat she’d long-since taken off. Absently he takes that hand in his, pressing the pads of his fingertips against hers. “This is… well, it’s wonderful,” she tries again. “But is it really… Well, you’re back off to school in a month. God, it feels like you’re only just back.”

Jon sits up properly then. “Won’t you be here when I’m back at Christmas?” he asks.

“Of course I will!” she says. “But what is it we’re even doing? I mean to say. Is this really practical, Jon?”

An unpleasant sensation of sinking fills his gut as her words process, and he feels very suddenly as though his throat’s settled somewhere at the pit of his stomach.

He forces himself to meet her gaze when he asks, “So you won’t wait for me?”

“What?”

“Of course, I understand,” he says quietly. “I had thought…” But he shakes his head. It doesn’t matter what he’d thought.

“Thought what?” Ygritte’s looking at him like she hasn’t the faintest idea where this conversation’s just turned. “Jon, I would wait for you for years if there was even the slightest chance of a future for us, but of course that’s completely ridiculous. I don’t think - ”

“Why?” he asks, the reasons for her rejection suddenly dawning on him. “Why is that completely ridiculous?”

She actually laughs at that.

“Because,” she says, though there’s little joy in it, “your father’s only a bloody earl.”

“And I'm no viscount,” he cuts in. "I'm not  _Robb,_ or Bran even or... I’ll never stand to inherit any part of it." _  
_

"It's still not so easy as all that."

“I’m not peerage and I never will be. I’ll be a solicitor, and with any luck a good one, and I love you, Ygritte Wilde, and I want you to be my wife.”

He hadn’t meant to say it, hasn’t even put it in those terms to himself yet, but when the words come, Jon knows them to be true. He loves her. He _loves_ her. He can trace back the years of his life and find her there in every shout of laughter, every drop of rain. She’s been his closest friend as far back as he can remember, in ways entirely different from his brother’s love. And yet she’s more than that. She’s part of what made him, part of his very essence. He loves her, and he never wants to do without her.

Ygritte’s staring at him, lips parted slightly in shock.

“Jon - ”

“Don’t say no,” he says softly. “Please don’t do that. You’re my best friend. And it would only be two years, three tops. Father’s friend Mr. Mormont has a place for me at his firm once I’ve left school, and we could - ”

She closes the distance between them and shuts him up promptly with a kiss.

Much too soon she breaks away, but only just, and when she speaks he can feel the whisper of her breath against his mouth.

“That may be the most I’ve ever heard you speak in one go, Jon Stark,” she murmurs, eyes fixed on his lips.

“Is that a yes?” he asks, practically breathless.

“Yes,” she says, eyes flicking upward to meet his dead on as if daring him to take it back, and his stomach turns on itself delightfully. “But you’ll have to buy me a proper ring to make it all official-like.”

 

He does buy her a ring, drives the car all the way out to Newcastle one morning so as not to attract attention, uses credit he knows will take up nearly half of this next year’s allowance to do it. He knows she was half-teasing when she said it and never expected anything so fine, but the look of absolute shock on her face when he slips it on her finger that evening after dinner is worth a thousand times the ring’s value.

She wears it on a simple chain tucked down the front of her frock. House staff regulations ban jewellery, and besides, she explains, she’d rather avoid awkward questions for the time being.

They’ll tell everyone at Christmas, they decide. They can keep a secret for half a year.

 

On Tuesday, the 4th of August, 1914, at approximately midnight, Britain declares war on Germany, and everything changes.

 

Given the fanfare and general excitement in the village square, Jon is entirely unprepared for Ygritte’s reaction.

“You can’t be surprised,” he protests when she refuses to say anything, refuses to tear her eyes away from the cottage window where he suspects she’s not looking at anything at all, only staunchly using it as an excuse not to look at him. “We’re all joining up. And me and Robb, given our commissions, we won’t be in any real danger, you know.”

Not that he can be sure of the truth of that. Robb, maybe, but in truth he can’t say that he’ll be granted an equal rank to his brother. There’s a certain confidence in saying it as fact, though.

Ygritte grits her teeth.

“This wasn’t the plan,” she says at long last. “You’re meant to go to school. You’re meant to read law. We’re meant to tell everyone we’re bloody _engaged_ come Christmastime - ”

“We can tell them before I leave. But I have a duty to my country. I’m a man grown and I - ”

“No, you’re not!” she suddenly shouts, and Jon has to duck in order to dodge the engagement ring she flings at him. “You all think you are but you’re not! You, Robb, Gendry - the lot of you. You’re just boys, stupid boys, and there are people that need you _here_.”

She watches as he slowly bends down to pick up the ring, and then promptly bursts into tears.

Heedless of the danger of something being thrown at his head again, Jon’s arms are around her in an instant. The fight Ygritte puts up against him is half-hearted at best, and he can feel his heart thumping hard and fast against her cheek as she rides out her tears with her face buried in his chest.

The spaces between her sobs grow longer and her breathing slows to a steady pace once more. One of Jon’s hands is tangled in her red hair, but he gently places the other upon her cheek, thumb wiping the last of her tears from the corner of her eye.

“War isn’t a game, Jon,” she says finally, voice barely more than a dull husk. “It takes boys with their whole lives ahead of them, and it spits back dead men.”

 _Like my father_ , is what she doesn’t say.

Jon places a kiss to her brow, slow and soft and placating, and curls his hand in hers, gently pressing the ring he’d bought her into her palm. A moment’s hesitation, and she allows him to slip it onto her slim finger, heedless of the chain dangling from it. He breathes in her tangy scent, and says the only thing he can think to, the schoolboy phrase he had been reminded of by the radio only hours before.

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” he whispers against her hair, down and loose for once, the strands brushing soft against the corner of his mouth.

Almost immediately Ygritte pulls away from him. She says nothing for a long moment, only eyeing him with a look somewhere between pity and pleading. 

“No,” she says at long last. “It isn’t.”

**Author's Note:**

> I had to end it there! I'm sorry, I just can't make myself write sad things for these two, their canon is tragic enough.
> 
> A huge thank you to singingfirefliess, who not only encouraged me to tackle this despite my complete lack of WWI knowledge, but created [this thing of beauty](http://singingfirefliess.tumblr.com/post/94925390654/jon-ygritte-wwi-au-inspired-by-this-post-by), which was an enormous source of inspiration. This quite literally would not exist without your top class cheerleading.
> 
> Comments, thoughts, and fact-checking much appreciated.


End file.
